As a photographer, you have a wonderful advantage when it comes to marketing. You already have an amazing inventory of stunning images to help advance your brand. And of course, blogging regularly and consistently is the cornerstone to a successful Content Marketing strategy. But, let’s make sure you’re getting the most from those blogs and your beautiful images. Creating Guides, eBooks, and Infographics can help you get more mileage out of your existing content.

Guides and eBooks: The Next Step in Content Marketing

Guides are a labor of love. A guide or eBook is a longer piece of content intended to solve a major problem for your clients. They are usually compiled from multiple sources, sometimes including interviews or sections from additional expert contributors. Guides and eBooks are loaded with outbound links and are a great way to give some local vendors some love. Because of the additional length, where a blog post can be compiled in about an hour, a guide may take longer. Guides and eBooks can range anywhere from five pages to well over one hundred.

Use Existing Blogs as an Outline

As an alternative to writing a guide from scratch, use your existing blog posts as the base. Take a look at your site analytics. Do you have a few posts that get a lot of shares? Consider focusing on your most popular posts. Pull them together into a single topic to write a guide. Use your existing posts as an outline and layer on additional information to build a larger content piece.

You can even reach out to other photographers, local vendors, and past clients to reference them in the guide as well.

The resulting guide will act as both a marketing and a networking tool!

Distribution Strategies

Once you have a topic selected, consider how you will get the guide or eBook into the hands of your target market. There are a few different strategies on how to get guides and eBooks into the hands of your target clients, and these vary based on your clients’ needs and the topic of your guide.

Targeted Email

One strategy is emailing the content directly to your existing clients. The best guides to be emailed to clients are on topics that are relevant and useful to them. Usually, these would be specific and unique to what it means to be a client. These guides can vary in scope and in topic, but they are an amazing way to showcase your images and delight your clients. Consider topics like:

• Preparing a Wedding Timeline
• Stunning Locations for your Engagement Session
• Your Newborn Shoot: What to Expect
• Our Autumn Wedding Idea Book
• The Senior Portrait Inspiration Guide

Remember that a guide must provide useful information to your clients, even more than a blog post. Where a blog post can be quickly skimmed and enjoyed, guides and eBooks need to be compelling to keep clients reading all the way through. If you need ideas, one of our writers discussed how her photographer made great use of an email strategy in a blog post here: Why I love my Wedding Photographer.

Call to Action: Download

Another guide strategy is to provide the guide as a download. This is a very effective way to exchange content for personal information; collecting a prospective client’s contact information with the hope of being able to reach out with additional content later. This is an excellent opportunity for you to connect with new prospects and an easy reason to follow up to gather their thoughts.

Companies like Photoshelter and ShootDotEdit have done a fantastic job creating resources for photographers. They have curated guides, webinars, and blog posts all focused on helping photographers grow and sustain thriving businesses. Each guide focuses on an area of business that their clients want to know about and are different from the service they offer. These are great examples to follow.

If you decide to write a guide, check out the content they have created, and be sure to think about what problems you can solve for your clients and how you and your content can be a resource.

Infographics: Quick and Shareable Bite-Sized Content

Another way to get more mileage out of your images is through the use of infographics. Infographics are a great way to make information eye catching, shareable, and easily digestible. They also play a crucial role in the increasingly visual role of marketing. Infographics are like currency on Pinterest and Instagram, creating a visual and eye-catching representation of information that is easy to share.

You already have a wealth of beautiful images. Get some more mileage out of them by adding text to them or incorporating them into infographics. There are a few sites, like Canva, that will even create the infographic for you! All you need are the images and the words.

In Closing:

Your blog is just one part of a strong marketing strategy. With your existing inventory of images, you can easily expand your available content into guides, eBooks, and infographics. Using your existing blogs to build a base of your content, you can create a strong inventory to share, re-share, and distribute to your potential clients.

Start building your inventory of posts today! For more information on how blogging is just one part of a content strategy, take a look at our eBook, “Beyond Blogging.” And of course, if you need help getting inspired, let us know. The Fotoskribe team is happy to help you write and schedule your content to get the most out of your amazing images. We’re here to help you take your blogging to a new level!